antimatter
by FeeptheNinja
Summary: Tales from a photo-negative Gensokyo. [This fic is not intended for perusal by children. Swearing.]
1. Anti-Yukari

**== Yukari Yakumo: Play some chess.**

 **You went to see your girlfriend today. Made a whole day of it, really, as you often do, although of course you're markedly not sober in any way because you never are. You left the house to Ran, gave her some peace and quiet to finish her fucking fanfiction or whatever she writes all day. You've gone to see Yuyuko and that's all you care about.**

 **Yuyuko is, of course, right where you left her, because she can't actually move. Being an eldritch entity (that devours souls) currently bound to a remarkably evil tree, she doesn't really have the ambulatory muscles needed to get up and move. Probably for the best, because if she *could* move, the apocalypse would be over and done with in a day or two.**

 **She screams something in a vaguely angry, vaguely pained sort of demonic black speech, and you nod and reply that yes, it's still winter outside of the Netherworld. Yes, forty more people froze to death. Yes, you can fudge some numbers to get their souls delivered right to her. Yes, Chen's girls killed off about a hundred more and yes you have the souls she ripped from them right here. The screeches quiet to a discontent rumbling after that, and you toss the bottles into the pulsing black void between time and space that used to be a tree and used to be the love of your life. Or still is. You don't know. You smirk at her next growls, and you reply in the most infuriating sing-song tone you can muster, because that still amuses her and it's the least you can do after failing her so completely a thousand years ago.**

 **She wants your soul.**

 **As always.**

 **And, as always, you giggle and stroke the outer edge of the maddening death-blackness, feel the nothingness creep into your fingers for a moment before pulling away. You tell her of course she can have your soul, but she has to win it first, and you pull out the chess set. You remind her, teasingly, that this is how Death is supposed to do things, darling, want a drink before we begin?**

 **She can't drink, anyway, but you feel it's only polite to ask, and so you ask that soulless little girl that tends the tree too, because she at least has the requisite esophagus.**

 **The little girl stares a hole into your head and remains utterly silent.**

 **More for me, you declare cheerfully, and down the entire bottle of rice wine in one go. Then three more. By the time you actually start setting up the board, you are blind-drunk and it's not reacting very well with the other shit you have in you that's keeping you as high as a kite. You are actually blind in one eye at this point, but that's temporary and you don't worry because this case of vertigo you have is like being on a rollercoaster except on solid ground! Wheeee! Ah, fuck, you said that out loud.**

 **You're not worried about losing that soul of yours, anyway, because you cheat like a motherfucker and always have and always will. Yuyuko doesn't mind. She probably doesn't have the presence of mind to care. Just like you! God, you love her. She's the only reason you have to live.**

 **You propose to the snarling tree-demon at least four times while you're playing. She doesn't respond.**

 **== Yukari Yakumo: Get fucked up.**

 **You wonder who the hell this new voice in your head takes you for. You have been well and truly fucked up for about a week straight now, and if this new shit that border-hopping shopkeep brought you is as good as he says it is, you will remain fucked up for at least another two. You don't sleep anymore. You can't. There is nothing good for you in that hell of feverish nightmares, so you've given it up entirely. Hopefully the habit will shave about seven thousand years off your lifetime. You already have a coffin, tombstone, and witty epitaph lined up. Your death cannot come fast enough.**

 **You take another squint at the bottle in your hand. You can't actually read all the little words on it anymore, as your ability to focus your eyes left you about a day ago and hasn't come back since, but it's a nice cliche and you do so anyway. Maybe it will get that girl in front of you to go away. Can't she see you're currently in the process of forgetting your own name?**

 **Oh god, she's saying something. You can't make out what, exactly, because the humming and buzzing and whispery water in your ears is rather loud, but whatever it is, she sounds good and pissed off about it. You drag your eyes away from the neat shifting patterns on the ceiling and to somewhere around where you think the girl is, and through all the new colors drifting in front of your eyes you think you see an abundance of orange and black.**

 **So it's the new Hakurei girl. Yeah, she always was kind of a bitch. Maybe she would have been nicer if her mom lived long enough to give her a name, but as it stood, the task had gone to your dumb fucking fox who had picked out Reimu for whatever reason. The kid was a zero, all right, a pyromaniac zero. Whatever, at least she was alive, at least she hadn't been picked off by the cats, at least she wasn't starving. Everyone was zeroes, here, and you don't have enough lucidity left to give a single flying fuck.**

 **Is she still talking? Fucking hell. You wish she'd shut up so you can get back to watching the ceiling. But she just keeps standing there and bitching, bitching, bitching - oh great, now she's touching you with that damn divine rod. You're sure it burns, but you can't actually feel it very much, just some faint prickling sensation along your cheek.**

 **You mumble something probably incoherent, and hold out the half-empty bottle to her like some kind of a peace offering. Her face is close enough to yours that you can make out her eternally pissy expression, and you offer nothing more than a mellow grin in response. Her mom's been dead for twenty years, and the only lesson you can teach this kid is when to fold 'em - fold 'em, get trashed, and stop giving so much of a shit. You stopped giving a shit a thousand years ago, and you've maybe brushed against the broadside of happiness once or twice since then. You're not sure. You can't remember very much of those thousand years.**

 **She stares at you for a good long minute before snatching the bottle and hell yes, bottoms up, kid. It literally knocks her off her feet - the shopkeep upped the ante on this shit to youkai-grade, but the kid's always been a tough one, and she manages to go for a full five swallows before her back kisses the floor and the bottle falls out of her hand because her muscles just won't let her hold it anymore. She lays there for a bit, breathing (and a small droplet of drool drips down her cheek), until she finally breaks out into some lopsided grin, stretching her hand lazily into the air and swirling her fingers around what looks to you like a tiny galaxy.**

 **You laugh.**

 **It starts out as a giggle, moves up to a chuckle, goes through a few more escalating phases before it graduates to a full on sustained belly-laugh and you lie on your bed laughing like a madwoman because hell, that's what you are. You laugh, and laugh, and she joins in.**

 **The two of you stay very fucked-up for a while, and that's just the way you like it.**

 **== Yukari Yakumo: What's your name?**

 **Your name? Hahaha, what the fuck's a name?**


	2. Anti-Yuyuko

**== Be the snarling tree-demon.**

 **DEATHDEATHDEATHDEATHLETMESMOTHERITLETMESMOTHERLIFEANDSNAPBONESLIKETWIGSLETMEDEVOURANDDRINKOFTHEIRSOULSLETMEUPTOUSHERINTHEFALLOFMANANDYOUKAIALIKE**

 **== Snarling tree-demon: Holy shit, calm your tits.**

 **Honestly, your tits are remarkably calm and have remained that way for quite some years. You also have a name: it's Yuyuko Saigyouji. That has never changed, unlike your physical form. Alright, so perhaps you were flipping the fuck out for a couple hundred years, but that was back when this mess all started. You have become quite complacent in your new role of tempering the mood of Death, which seems to be a snarling tree-demon and not the hooded reaper most people think of.**

 **When you say "tempering the mood", you really mean "getting dragged along for the ride and hoping your calm nature is enough to get it to rethink its actions". It's not, and the tree does not, but it is also a tree no matter how frothingly angry it is and so it can't really move to make good on its threats regardless. You are sort of useless, in the grand scheme of things. You are fairly sure things would not be much different even if you had truly managed to kill yourself and hadn't ended up merging your soul with Death. You are sure the white-haired child who tends the tree's roots would have lost her soul to it regardless. You are equally sure your best friend and sometime lover would have lost it just as utterly as she has now.**

 **== Yuyuko Saigyouji: Reminisce about your best-friend-sometime-lover.**

 **She is still, you maintain firmly, the sweet woman that loved you when you lived. She still comes to see you, once a week. She bothered to learn the screeching eldritch tongue you are now forced to speak in. She brings you souls to hush the demon and she even touches you, very lightly and only around the edges but it's still the most lovely thing you've felt in a thousand years. So Yukari, you say, is still good.**

 **You also desperately want her soul.**

 **You don't know if it's the tree talking or not.**

 **You have romanticized the act, romanticized it to stay sane. And half of your feelings about it are actually based somewhat on fact, rather than based on you turning a blind eye and talking out your ass. Very strong souls do stick around in this void. Some of them have even conversed with you, but only if you can call a wild slinging of incensed insults and slurs in your direction a "conversation". You know that Yukari would be different. You pray that Yukari would be different. She is the thousand-eyed demoness of Gensokyo, has lived for many hundred thousands of years and will likely live for many hundred thousands more. Unless she forgets to cheat during your weekly chess games, which you find unlikely.**

 **Although, with the way she's marinated in, ugh, a veritable laundry list of substances (some very highly illegal, some only worth a month or two in jail), you're surprised she can even form coherent sentences, most of the time. This tree knows more about drugs than you ever will, somehow, and it rattles off the list the moment Yukari stumbles up the stairs and often isn't finished by the time she drinks, wins, and leaves. Psychotropics, narcotics, stimulants, muscle relaxants - painkillers and outsider medications and enough rice wine to kill an entire stable of horses, and so, so much more. You find it to be a small miracle that she can still walk.**

 **You also know she's doing it because she wants to die and she has wanted to die for a thousand years. But whereas you stuck a blade in your gut and slashed and tore and watched your intestines hit the ground in a bloody heap just a little too close to a remarkably evil tree, she seems determined to die in such a way that she probably won't even be aware of her own passing. She'll be lying half-brain-dead on her bed one minute and fully-brain-dead the next, with no fanfare. She'll barely notice. You always feel a bit angry when you think about it, really, because if she's going to commit suicide she could go about it with some goddamn balls like you did, or better yet, she could fork over her soul to you already and stop this idiotic drugged-out farce she's been playing out for a millennia.**

 **God, you want it. So badly. The expression is "so badly you can taste it", but you hesitate to use it because it's hyperbole to humans but completely true to you. You can already feel it curled complacently on your tongue, tasting of alcohol and old-timey heroin cough syrup, royal purple and drunk affection. It wouldn't try to escape like so many others, wouldn't thrash against your teeth in a desperate bid for escape. It would barely even move. It would embrace its fate and nestle softly in your belly and whisper to you at all hours and you could reply without having to scream and gnash in demonic tongues, you could have real conversations again and she would never have to leave to feed her pets (which you doubt she does anyway) or take anything more from the shopkeep. No, she would remain with you until the end of days, and perhaps she would even manage to sober up after a hundred or so years, if that was something souls could do. You might be able to have coherent conversation again. You would like that.**

 **You really would.**

 **So you wait for her to let her king fall.**

 **You wait, in silent patience.**

 **== Yukari Yakumo: Lose.**

 **You already have.**


	3. Anti-Marisa

**== Be the girl with the doll limbs.**

 **You are Marisa Kirisame, all nine years of her. Currently, you are standing on the bed and stretching as much as you possibly can in order to grab one of your caretaker's dolls off of the top shelf. Thankfully, the small wooden thing notices your fingers peeking over the edge of said shelf and hovers down to sit on your shoulder, pushing your large white hat aside to make room for itself. Your caretaker's dolls rather like you. You think it's probably because your arms and left leg are just like theirs.**

 **Huh? No, you would not particularly like to talk about how you lost your original limbs. It doesn't matter, anyway, because Alice's house is safe from cats and you can move by yourself again and as previously mentioned you would not like to talk about it so let's move on, shall we?**

 **You have a lot of great friends here now, anyway. You know just about every doll in this house by name, even if Alice hasn't given them a name yet, and they are more than pleased to take some time to play with you should they be momentarily unoccupied. Since you have been confined to the Makaian princess's home for the past year and a half, you are quite well versed in making up your own fun. For example, you have managed to organize an entire doll soccer league. And a basketball league. And croquet. And a sport that doesn't actually exist but looks fun to play. Every corner of your room is painted with random little scenes, your desk is papered with drawings and stories, your bed is full of toys and books and games that have been "well-loved" to put it nicely.**

 **The long and short of it is that you are starting to get very bored.**

 **Alice means well, you understand this, and she loves you very much, which is nice because you really haven't had an adult even like you very much in a long long time. But you aren't exactly built (you giggle slightly at the pun as you bend the well-made wooden joints of your fingers) to be cooped up in the house for so long. You love having adventures, even if you're a bit cowardly (perhaps owing to your small size). You lived on the street - with the most imaginative little vagrants the Village had ever seen - for as long as you can remember, and honestly you don't know if you can really settle into the lifestyle of the well-to-do Gensokyan: that is, keep to your house, pay off the cats, and carry enough magical weaponry to destroy a small planet. Well. You could certainly settle into that last requirement quite easily. But Alice isn't teaching you the stuff that could blow a cat off the face of the Earth. She's teaching you mostly small illusions, automaton control, flares, things like that. Not that you don't think all that stuff is awesome, but you're more concerned with explosions than stage-grade magic.**

 **Maybe you could steal some more fire magic from Hakurei the next time Alice takes you and the rest of the dolls to the shrine for... uh, you really don't know why she goes. She and the miko end up screaming insults at each other an hour into the visit and then you go home. Maybe it's for the food? Hakurei really does make some excellent lunch. She's told you thrice that it's easy enough to make it when you can minutely control the fire. She likes you more than she likes Alice, which isn't saying much, and she still has a tendency to shove you out of the way and light your stuff on fire, but it's at least something. Besides, you do have to concede that you burn quite easily. "Kindling" isn't a nickname you would have even thought of before you met Hakurei, but now it's all she calls you.**

 **Alice never calls you that, though. It's always some variant of your real name, with a -chan at the end and dripping in sap, most of the time, but you can't say you don't like it. It's a welcome change from the cruder nicknames and straight-up screaming you used to have to put up with, and she's a lovely sort of unnaturally warm and she always smells clean and nice and her wings are ridiculously soft and downy for looking as much like tattooed bat-wings as they do. She tells you she'll have three pairs one day, and she says that when it happens she'll bring you and the rest of the dolls away with her and make a land all her own that's sunny and marvelous and green and you can play outside all you want, won't it be nice? It might take another couple hundred years, but you're not going anywhere and not getting much bigger. You're more wood and Alice's magic than human, after all, it's not an easy feat to keep a mauled child's blood pumping after her torso's been ripped open and her arms are lying ten feet away and her leg's barely attached and oh many gods you're not going to think about it no no no you are not. You are going to think about living with Alice in the nicest place you can possibly imagine.**

 **Actually, you're going to think about living with Alice in Makai, because she says as soon as your last little bits of human fade away into magician, she's going to find a way to get you back to Makai and you're going to stay there until she's a full goddess. It's not the absolute greatest place in the world, but she says it's leaps and bounds above anarchy and poverty and wanton manslaughter. Besides that, her mother runs the place, and you can then meet her family and live in a gigantic palace and probably never explore the fullest reaches of it and make friends and, in general, it will be much better than here. You told Hakurei once and she just scowled and spat something about relief efforts only caring about cute kids, and singed your hair with a short breath of black fire and assaulted your ears with about five hundred different words you're not supposed to say. Although you'd never heard "pisscouch" used as an insult before and doubt you will again.**

 **In any case, you have boredom to alleviate, and also you have to get around to properly fireproofing yourself before you and Alice go visiting again.**


End file.
